In Sydney for 24 hours for work.

As much as I'm not a fan of Sydney, it is very pretty by night when you're flying over it - the lights kind of inspired me and I might try to work out some art things from the photos I took.

Flying over Albury Wodonga was really pretty, too.

Really should get to bed. Barry White songs have just turned up on iTunes and that's probably a frightening thing to experience before bed, about on par with someone leaping out from the wardrobe with a Jason Voorhees mask on.

Vegemitebeabadidea

I saw big display for the new Vegemite in Safeway the other day.

That's definitely never, ever going to enter my trolley, let alone my house or my mouth, based purely on the way it looks. And that's before I even start thinking about Vegemite mixed with cream cheese, which sounds vile.

As my oldest, favourite-est friend Amy says, if they remove normal Vegemite from sale, they can go fornicate themselves with an iron stick.

I rather love normal Vegemite. Not only is it tasty, it amuses me.

When a friend from Germany was visiting years ago, he wanted to try it, as he'd heard about it. We bought a small bottle of it and, in spite of all my warnings and attempting to physically stop him, he smeared an entire teaspoon full of Vegetmite on a slice of bread. The expressions that crossed his face after he took a big bite of it made me wish I had a camera at that time.

Clare and I had a White Trash Day on Sunday, which involved dressing up in trashy clothing, visiting Supre (amongst other stores) and going to Hungry Jacks. It's all part of a tradition that stems from uni and White Trash Days there, which also involved Supre. And cowboy hats. Although this time, I wore cowboy boots.

Anyway.

We started the day at Hungry Jacks at around 10.30. There, we saw teen guys in trackpants that were slung waaaaaay too low, revealing crack. That was something that put me off my meal. And then on the way out, two other teen guys said, "Hello ladies!" at us, with suggestive eyebrow waggling. Which reduced us to fits of laughter, particularly when we got honked at by a car driven by two guys with a backseat full of children.

From there, it was shopping, which was more frightening than trashy, mainly due to the way in which Supre seems to have far less leopard print and sequins than they did a few years ago when I was in uni, and way more leggings and snap-crotch leotards. I may or may not have screamed when I saw the snap-crotch leotards and leapt backwards, nearly bumping into a shop assistant.

And then, we saw this car.

The driver of it was sitting in the car, pushing the button on the traffic lights. A little odd...

But a fun day, on the whole.

Painting process

Just a boring ol' post about the process for the painting I did last weekend as K and S's somewhat belated wedding present.

I was going to do something like this (except with Adelaide as the subject, rather than Melbourne):


But changed my mind, and did this instead:








(Photos all taken with my mobile, so excuse the quality.)

Additional thought for the day: Don't worry, be happy, things could be worse, you could be Salman Rushdie. An oldie, but a goodie.

Look into the fingers...

I bought Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis the other week and am finally watching it (mainly because ABC has decided to not work when I would have watched Miss Marple instead!). But on the whole, I love French movies - particularly French comedies.

And this one is incredibly amusing. To the point where I just laughed so hard and loud that I nearly fell off my chair and made the neighbour's dogs start barking. Oops. But what happens in the scene is that they're doing a welcome BBQ for the guy's wife (who thinks that the north is all its's stereotyped to be).

She looks at the BBQ and asks, "What are we eating?" "Meat." "What kind?" "Oh, whatever we can find..." *guy emerges from doorway with shotgun, chasing a cat, fires it as the cat runs away and then says, "S**t! Missed."*

Wouldn't you know it? ABC works now that Miss Marple is finished.

Anyway. Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis. Hilarious. Watch it.

Trashed

^ We found this today on our travels, which was initially a bit scary when you're driving past and think you've come across an accident or something very similar. Pulled up and then realised that it was just that someone had trashed the car. We got out, walked back to it and had a look at the damage. And took photos, of course.

^ Snow and ferns.

Snowcone

^ K, S and I went up to the snow this afternoon and while up there, K threw a handful of snow. The result was this. A literal snowcone. Perfectly shaped. Rather bizarre, but also amusing.

Oh, they loved the painting as well! Hurrah!

^ Did some painting today, after quite a long time of not doing anything all that artistic. I was surprised at how long this actually took me, considering what it's of - some of Adelaide reflected in the River Torrens. I was thinking the reflections would be really easy and the buildings, etc not that much more work. All in all, it ended up taking about eight hours (and that's with using the hair-dryer to dry the base paint).

There's some bits of it I still want to change, but I might do that in the morning before K and S arrive bright and early for brunch. Oh, and I have to put the things on to hang it with. Hopefully their house has a space big enough for the painting.

I must do more art. I'd forgotten how much I ultimately enjoy it. Once it's done. It can be really tiring while doing all of the work though. Plus it makes my legs go to sleep (I always sit cross-legged on the floor while doing art - space to spread all of the art material out).

Buuut there's a long way to go with everything.

Animals in cages

^ Peek-a-blocks. Too cute to resist... :-/

Engrenages again

Last year, I ended up being quite fascinated by Spiral (Engrenages), although the first few episodes had left me rather puzzled. And the conclusion to the series was frustrating - there wasn't really a resolution thanks to diplomatic immunity, deaths and so on.

The other week, I bought the second series, and after watching one-and-a-half episodes last weekend, I ended up being too annoyed by the corruption of the character of lawyer Joséphine Karlsson (mainly because the people she was protecting through being corrupt are complete and utter swines) and the accusations against police captain Laure Berthaud. Plus acting chief prosecutor Pierre Clément is being a bit dull.

However, I still love the character of Judge François Roban (he's so eccentric and wonderful) and now the character of Gilou is past the drug thing he was doing in the first series... Mreowr.

Anyway. I watched the other half of the episode from the weekend and then decided to watch the final episode of the series. Yes, yes, that spoils everything. But I got frustrated with the idea of the first series (with no resolution) and didn't want to spend hours watching this, optimistically hoping the characters who are about as pleasant as the way ancient Egyptians removed brains from mummies wouldn't just get away with things.

Even though that's probably most likely what happens in real life.

So I watched the final episode. And now feel content with watching the rest of the series. It's not going to be another series with no resolution. The ones who have done the wrong thing get their comeuppance. Innocence is proved where injustice had threatened to reign. It's how you expect things should end, simply because we've come to expect such things from crime dramas rather than real life.

Anyhoodle, should sleep. It's been a long day.

"Maybe he's on acid or just watched a whole Jeremy Kyle..." - Mark, Peep Show.

Electro... clash?

I'm more or less like a magpie when it comes to things that are bright, shiny and new. Particularly if it's combined with things I already like or feel that life would be enhanced by having (such as a pack of chewing gum or a big, shiny rocket ship).

Last night, I found these in Safeway in between cape capers. They're part of a Wrigley's series of chewing gums that go by the name of "5." They were with the other varieties of chewing gum and cough lollies and so on and don't really come packaged in a way that will automatically make you think they belong there...

The packaging told me that it's gum that's Made in China. I bought it anyway, hoping it would be like Wrigley's Doublemint. Oh how I love and adore Doublemint. It's the perfect combination of... well... mints.

But back to the topic at hand - Electro gum!

When I got home, I tried some. It certainly tastes like Made in China. Possibly from formaldehyde-flavoured formaldehyde.

But the packaging is shiny and rather nice, and I do like the individually-wrapped, environment-killing, resource-wasting, sticks of gum.

The flavour, though? The flavour is full of BLEH. This is one chewing gum that I definitely won't be buying again, regardless of shiny packaging or the verdant green of the foil wrappings or even its name. Then again, who really calls gum "Electro"?

Zombie Elvis?

^ Err... No, not really. Just the officemate as Elvis for a farewell thing. He and I wrote a song for it, wrangled with the wig to get it looking more like Elvis and less like Roy Orbison in a wind tunnel, laughed outrageously and were just a little frightened by the sideburns attached to the glasses (see first pic).

'Twas fun, although a lil' sad.

But I'm sure the officemate has a potential career ahead of him as an Elvisgram, once he works out the leg/hip/shakey actions out totally. I would post a vid of the dancing practise, but it may not be safe for the eyes of the innocents.

Supermarket Reaper

^ The Grim Reaper checks what the goss mags have to say about Michael Jackson in Safeway and then wonders, Is it Helgas?

Went to Safeway on an out-of-the-blue kind of trip, which was kind of reminiscent of Bi-Lo runs at odd hours of the morning/night/day when at uni. But it was amusing enough. Although not as amusing as the time Clare, Anna and I bought plastic toy soldiers and super-glued them to things around uni. We were obviously rather bored at that time. But ahh, happy memories.

Also found Jelly Joy! stocked in the lolly aisle. I loooove Jelly Joy! It's a seaweed jelly with fruit flavouring and is all kinds of squishy, slimy goodness. Might take some photos of that tomorrow. But I should also take photos of the Peek-a-Blocks (they had elephants in them! I love elephants!) and post photos of Elvis googling Elvis (which didn't cause space and time to tear in half and suck us all into the swirling vortex of nothingness).

^ Vitamin Water. Like cordial, but so much more expensive.

Manky mandarin

^ The most disgusting mandarin. I was cutting up mandarins to juice on Friday, and this one looked perfect on the outside. But inside, it was rather weirdly mouldy. Shrieked and flung it into the scrap bin, then vigorously washed the knife and was a bit hesitant about the remaining few mandarins. Just in case...

^ Sunrise this morning.

My question exactly

Overheard when exiting Safeway:

Early teens guy earnestly to his mother about the resurgence of 1980s fashion: What kind of society normalises that!?
Mother: *shakes head sadly*

Küche, Kirche, Kinder und kommst du mit?

^ Nothing will ever beat cheese and salad sandwiches from Apex bakery in Tanunda, but this sandwich I had at lunch today came pretty close.

Okay, it may seem odd to blog about a sandwich, but it was fantastic. Particularly the bread. The inside was soft and fluffy, with the most perfectly crisp, crunchy crust and a flavour of proper bread.

I think the bread is what makes a sandwich. The bread from the Apex bakery is - quite seriously and with absolutely no exaggeration at all - the best bread. The sourdough process and woodfiring are things done by other bakeries, but they don't get anywhere near Apex in terms of flavour, texture and tradition.

I actually had Apex bakery bread at K and S's place about a month or so ago. It was almost a religious experience. Although it was slice of the simple white loaf, lightly toasted, I couldn't add anything else to it other than some butter and took forever to eat it, simply because I was enjoying it so much. There may have even been some moaning involved.

Being away from the Barossa and rarely - if ever, now days - going back makes me realise how lucky I was to grow up there. Not just because of the gorgeous countryside and having great friends there, but also because of the food traditions. They all grew out of the things the German settlers brought with them, and I think there's been a wonderful continuation of the traditions of the regional cuisine. There's a book called Barossa Food that explores all of this kind of thing and was written by someone my Mum used to work with. Maggie Beer's also done a lot for Barossa food.

The main problem is that when I start thinking about the Barossa, I get incredibly homesick. I remember the sweeping corner you'd drive around on the way from Greenock to Nuriootpa. There was a farm house there and every year, they'd have dill cucumbers for sale. There was Linke's bakery in Nuri with the best pasties and bienenstich. The bakery in Angaston made really wonderful lamingtons. Apex was where you went for streuselkuchen, too.

The multitude of restaurants in the valley, offering food from the most simple through to complicated. Red cabbage at Cafe Heidelberg and oh my gosh, the schwarzwaldkirschtorte. There was also a lovely little restaurant in Bethany that I can't remember the name of. But we went there for my grandparent's golden anniversary and it was lovely, from what I remember of it (it was years and years ago).

*sigh*

Just one sandwich and I'm all nostalgic.

Random booky ramblings

I find lists of "must" see/visit/do/eat/drink/listen to/etc things rather curious and usually end up reading them. Most of the time, these sort of lists tend towards the pretentious bollocksery side of things, because obviously you haven't really lived until you've sipped holy water from Lourdes while walking the Great Wall of China reading War and Peace in its original Russian, accompanies by a child prodigy on a zither.

The most recent list I've read was this morning's 100 novels everyone should read in The Telegraph.

Of the 100 novels on that list, I've read 30 and there are a handful I've wanted to read, but never found a copy of - something I'll be rectifying when Penguin releases their next lot of Popular Penguins, which includes Cold Comfort Farm. Additionally, I'm puzzled by the inclusion of some novels by certain authors when they have other novels that are far superior (such as having Dumas's The Three Musketeers, but not The Count of Monte Cristo, which in my opinion, is a far greater novel in content, themes and understanding).

Then there's the books on the list I've attempted/started to read.

I found Middlemarch so boring my eyes wished to pack a suitcase and move to Siberia for something a little more interesting (obviously, I didn't get far with it). Anna Karenina is a book I've been forcing myself to attempt to read for years. Every now and then I pick my copy up, read a few pages and remember why it would take me approximately the same amount of time as a nuclear winter to finish because I find it so interminably dull. Crime and Punishment was more punishment than anything. I've almost finished 1984, but it's not as scintillating as it's sold as. Ulysses was... is that a shiny thing over there..? Tess of the D’Urbervilles was about as exciting as Wessex on a wet day.

Anyway.

There's the other issue - the rest of the books on the list are ones I have no interest in. Which is akin to admitting to being a book heathen, because these are all of the kind of books you should read when wanting to not sound like a total philistine. There are some books that are just meant to be read to be discussed in certain ways in certain circles. They're not meant to be enjoyed. You're just meant to enjoy the feeling of satisfaction when you tell people you've read them and they either look awed or puzzled.

All of this aside...

There's no point to making a list of the best books or films or anything ever made. It'll change all the time because new things are constantly being made to fill the needs of the masses. Tastes change all the time and there aren't that many books that will remain constant. Unfortunately, there are many, many texts that have disappeared over time (although there are more companies working to bring them back to "life" - such as Persephone Books).

If I had to compile a list of the 100 books I think people should read before they shuffle off this mortal coil, I'd probably want to update it every now and then as I come across other books that make books on the list seem less important or relevant (but my top 10 would definitely include The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas, Martin Chuzzlewit and Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens and fairytales by George MacDonald (in particular The Golden Key)). I'd probably want to just make a list of books I've enjoyed, rather than books I feel I should have enjoyed.

No list will ever please anyone, let alone everyone - personal tastes and whatnot. But it's interesting to see what interests others and what they feel are important novels.

^ Diva sales can sometimes be a useful thing. This style of ring was still priced normally on the racks, but I found one of them on the sale pile for $5. Hurrah.

^ This king parrot landed on the railing while I was hanging out the washing and he was bobbing around to Hilltop Hoods (I think he liked Chase That Feeling), chattering away at me in parrot-y language. But he just wouldn't do it when I tried to film him. Cheeky minx.

He stayed around for about 40 minutes or so, wandering up and down the railings, hopping around on the ferns. He'd get really excited when I'd make parrot noises back at him, which was amusing. Most of the time, I could have just reached out and patted him, but resisted the urge. He would have either freaked out or used the beak. Or both.

Snowmen

^ Made a couple of snowmen while up at the snow this morning.

Placenta update:

Officemate: Your hair looks so shiny and soft today! It's not just because I'm hallucinating with the 'flu, is it?
Me: No. It's the placenta.
Officemate: Oh! So you finally used it? Cool!

Later...

Copyeditor: I thought your hair looked especially spritely today.
Me: The placenta worked!
Copyeditor: Awesome! Wait, holy crap, you're serious.
Me: *nearly falls over laughing*
Copyeditor: I find it hard to think of anything I'd be less likely to put anywhere near my head. Other than a power drill.

So the Hask Placenta stuff worked, really. It has made my hair noticeably softer and shinier and I'm pretty pleased with it. Will definitely be buying more tomorrow and then lining up the little vials on the bathroom shelf, which I'm sure will be considered a selling point of the house if/when it comes to that.

Placenta.

Hask Placenta for hair, that is.

I have to admit, I was disappointed. I had been hoping it’d be slippery. Gooey. That it’d drip satisfyingly in a viscous sort of fashion. But it was watery, insipid, not at all what I’d expected (and secretly hoped – I kind of wanted to squeal like a little kid when I poured it onto my hands. Instead it was a response more along the lines of, “Oh… Dull!”).

Incidentally, Invaders Must Die was totally not the right sort of album choice to accompany the use of Hask Placenta. It’s too energetic for something so non-industrial/watered-down lambing season.

And it didn’t even have much of a perfume. Not that I was expecting it to smell of sheep—more like I’d thought it would probably have a heavy perfume to encourage people to distance their thoughts of just where the placenta comes from.

It had all looked so promising in its little vial, though, with the pearlescent sheen the liquid had when you shook it up. Hopefully that sheen is what will make hair shiny and happy.

So far it doesn’t seem to bad.

I also did another thing for the first time ever—used a hairdryer to dry my hair. In the past, the only time I’ve used hairdryers was to make those puffy fabric paints puff up in the late 80s and to dry condensation out of my camera. My hair’s naturally pretty voluminous (not to mention in possession of a mind of its own and tendency to want to get into everything). Hairdrying it turned it into the biggest hair this side of the 1980s.

It wasn’t even fully dry when I decided to stop so that I’d be able to get out of the bathroom.

Bend Your Mind by Elysian Fields is the perfect hairdrying song, though.

Hask Placenta verdict: Womb for improvement.

No heroics?

^ Random photos of Kez in her cape. For some reason, it kind of makes me think of Hot Fuzz.

^ Sedately "dashing" through the snow.

^ SNOOOOOOW!

And fantastic snow at that.

Kez, her lovely husband M and I went up to the snow today at lunch. There was apparently 28cms of depth, but that would have been up on the summit. Access wasn't available to the summit, unfortunately, and it was dangerous enough driving up to the carpark we got to with the amount of snow on the road.

But I love snow SO much. I've been ecstatic all day to the point where getting up at 6.30am to leave for work at 7am wasn't something that overly phased me (had to be there early as Larie had to be at work early). Apart from how cold it was this morning. I woke up around 4.30am, got up and put the heater on, hoping it'd take the chill off the air before I had to get up. It hadn't. Soooooo icy.

Also tried out my new snow boots and gloves. The gloves are okay and it's nice to have warm hands while up there. But you can't do anything at all hands-related without it being in the most fumbling fashion possible. The fingers are so thick with padding that you can't feel anything through them, so gripping stuff isn't the easiest, particularly when it's something small like a camera. Ended up going around with one glove on, one glove off. Worked for me.

The boots, however, are magnificent. Warm, waterproof, not really very slippery. Thank-you, Aldi!

Autumn remnants

Something I can't explain

Was going thru my Hotmail drafts folder and found an email I'd started writing on Sunday, May 4, 2003.

It simply says:

"Sweet mother of Abraham Lincoln!"

I'm as puzzled as you are.